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Don’t tell people how to do things
“Don’t tell people how to do things. Tell them what to do and let them surprise you with their results.”
–George S. Patton
Death
One of my first posts was a quote from Lawrence Block’s Everybody Dies:
“When you die, it is said you see your whole life. But you don’t see it minute by minute, like a speeded-up film. It’s like everything you ever did in all your days was a brushstroke, and now you see the whole painting all at once.”
Poet Billy Collins has a different view:
I wonder how it all got started, this business
about seeing your life flash before your eyes
while you drown, as if panic, or the act of submergence,
could startle time into such compression, crushing
decades in the vice of your desperate, final seconds.
From The Art of Drowning
The Wal-Mart you don’t know
“I first encountered Wal-Mart in the mid-1980s, when I worked in Kansas City. I watched as it marched through rural America, decimating downtown commercial districts everywhere it went. A corporate marauder, Wal-Mart had no mercy, no sense of anything but growth. It was, and is, an endlessly feeding shark.” [Fast Company]
Milton from Office Space
“And I said, I don’t care if they lay me off either, because I told, I told Bill that if they move my desk one more time, then, then I’m, I’m quitting, I’m going to quit. And, and I told Don too, because they’ve moved my desk four times already this year, and I used to be over by the window, and I could see the squirrels, and they were merry, but then, they switched from the Swingline to the Boston stapler, but I kept my Swingline stapler because it didn’t bind up as much, and I kept the staples for the Swingline stapler and it’s not okay because if they take my stapler then I’ll set the building on fire.”
— Milton from Office Space.